India shifts 50,000 troops to China border

CHINA’S military activity around Taiwan has drawn the world’s attention. But Beijing has also been busy elsewhere. Which is why India is rushing to reinforce its northern borders.

A bloody brawl erupted in the Himalayan high plateaus a year ago, in which more than 20 Indian and Chinese border troops were killed.

Beijing had been pushing the limits of decades-old territorial agreements.

New Delhi dug in its heels – but only after losing some 300sq km of mountain terrain.

The two have been engaged in a frosty standoff ever since.

No further fighting has so far occurred between the nuclear-armed neighbours. But tensions remain high. In the past year, India has repositioned some 50,000 troops along its Himalayan borders. Combat aircraft squadrons have been moved to northern bases. Tanks have been redeployed.

It’s been in response to China’s ongoing massive military build-up.

Almost 12 months after high-level military talks produced an agreement for a simultaneous withdrawal, neither side has backed down.

“That accord reduced the immediate risk of an armed confrontation, but tensions remain high, and warning indicators for conflict continue to blink red,” Professor Daniel Markey of the John Hopkins School of Advanced International

Relations said.

“Both sides remain fully committed to military strategies and tactics that will bring heavily armed forces into closer and deadlier contact.”

India digs in

A brief battle in 1962 set the scene for the simmering tensions. Communist China ––which invaded Tibet in 1949 –– wanted to push its borders to the southern side of the Himalayas from where it could observe a broad expanse of India’s lowlands.

New Delhi has accepted Beijing’s annexation of neighbouring Tibet. But it won’t accept attempts to redraw its borders.

Which is why about 20 of its troops died after a brutal fistfight on the banks of the freezing, thinaired Pangong Tso glacial lake in June last year. China has never openly admitted the full extent of its own casualties.

Reinforcing such troops is a tricky business. It takes up to six weeks to acclimatise the human body to the combination of cold and low atmospheric pressure. Simply rushing troops up to the mountain plateaus could kill them. Military analysts say India now has a total of 200,000 troops mobilised to maintain the border’s status quo.

Professor Markey says many of these have been redeployed from India’s tense Kashmir region on the border with Pakistan. Some 20,000 new troops appear to have been sent to reinforce Ladakh.

Another 30,000 have moved to the eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. These have been positioned between Bhutan and Myanmar and on the four-way border junction with Bangladesh.